David Folkenflik

Geraldo Rivera of Fox News has described NPR's David Folkenflik as "a really weak-kneed, backstabbing, sweaty-palmed reporter." Others have been kinder. The Columbia Journalism Review, for example, once gave him a "laurel" for reporting that immediately led the U.S. military to institute safety measures for journalists in Baghdad.

Based in New York City, Folkenflik is the media correspondent for NPR News. His stories and analyses are broadcast on the network's newsmagazines, such as All Things Considered, Morning Edition, and Here & Now,and are featured on NPR's website and mobile platforms. Folkenflik's reports cast light on the stories of our age, the figures who shape journalism and the tectonic shifts affecting the news industry. He profiled the Las Vegas columnist who went bankrupt fending off a libel lawsuit from his newspaper's new owner; conducted the first interview with New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet after his appointment; and chronicled how the demands of technology have forced the press corps to change how it covers presidential primaries.

Folkenflik is the author of Murdoch's World: The Last of the Old Media Empires. The Los Angeles Times called Murdoch's World "meaty reading... laced with delicious anecdotes" and the Huffington Post described it as "the gift that keeps on giving." Folkenflik is also editor of Page One: Inside the New York Times and the Future of Journalism. His work has appeared in such publications as the Washington Post, Politico Magazine, Newsweek International, the National Post of Canada, and the Australian Financial Review. Business Insider has called Folkenflik one of the 50 most influential people in American media.

Folkenflik joined NPR in 2004 after more than a decade at the Baltimore Sun, where he covered higher education, national politics, and the media. He started his professional career at the Durham (N.C.) Herald-Sun. Folkenflik served as editor-in-chief at the Cornell Daily Sun and graduated from Cornell with a bachelor's degree in history.

A four-time winner of the Arthur Rowse Award for Press Criticism from the National Press Club, Folkenflik has received numerous other recognitions, including the inaugural 2002 Mongerson Award for Investigative Reporting on the News and top honors from the National Headliners Club and the Society of Professional Journalists. He was the first Irik Sevin Visiting Fellow at Cornell and speaks frequently across the country. He often appears as a media analyst for television and radio programs in the U.S., the U.K., Canada, Australia and Ireland. Folkenflik lives with his wife, who is the senior director for original content at Audible (wholly owned by Amazon), and children in New York City.

Alex Jones has a following. His radio show is carried on more than 160 stations, and he has more than 1.8 million subscribers on YouTube.

And he claims to have the ear of the next president of the United States.

Jones is also one of the nation's leading promoters of conspiracy theories — some of which take on lives of their own. He has been a chief propagator of untrue and wild claims about a satanic sex trafficking ring run by one of Hillary Clinton's top advisers out of a pizzeria in Washington, D.C.

Donald Trump is meeting with The New York Times after all, despite announcing by Tweet early Tuesday morning that he was canceling sessions with the paper's executives and journalists.

It continued a whirlwind 24 hours of Trump's mixed messages to the media.

The president-elect kicked it off Monday with a session in which he had invited television news anchors and executives to establish a new working relationship, only to berate them for what he termed unfair campaign coverage. He then told them he wanted a reset with the press.

Steve Bannon, the newly named chief strategist for the nascent Trump White House, boasts a resume packed with a series of seeming non sequiturs. He had a stint in the U.S. Navy, worked for a stretch at Goldman Sachs, became a Hollywood investor who made a fortune off Seinfeld reruns, and ran the secretive experimental community Biosphere 2 outside Tucson, Ariz.

From pretty much the very start of this election season, Donald Trump grabbed the media by the press pass. He didn't even wait. As Trump, a former reality show host, once said in a slightly different context, "When you're a star, they let you do it."

AT&T's proposed $85.4 billion acquisition of Time Warner has cast renewed attention on the financial performance and journalistic independence of one of the media conglomerate's best-known possessions, CNN.

"You have to allow the organization to run independently," AT&T Chairman and CEO Randall Stephenson tells NPR. "It's not an altruistic thing either. I mean, I personally think it's a smart business thing to do. If the customer ever believes that the news is being tainted by the opinion of myself or somebody else within AT&T, that's brand damaging."

The whirling dervish that is Donald J. Trump spun ever-faster on Thursday, shredding almost everything in his range of vision — Hillary Clinton, his fellow Republicans who fail to support him unequivocally, the growing chorus of women accusing him of sexual misconduct, and especially the press.

For all the changes wrought by the sexual harassment scandal that brought down former Fox News Chairman Roger Ailes, the Murdoch family that controls the network has held one goal paramount: to maintain continuity.

Monday night's debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump will be the first time the two square off directly during this general election campaign. At such moments, the stakes are invariably characterized as high for the candidates, their presidential prospects on the brink of success or ruin.

For Gawker Media's websites to live, Gawker.com, the actual namesake website, has to die. It will be shut down next week by its new owner, a victim of its own poisoned legacy.

Any obituary should start by acknowledging the good the subject rendered to the world. There's no reason not to do that here, other than the extent to which that impulse might appall some of Gawker's own writers were it a piece about the demise of another publication.

Sumner Redstone and his daughter Shari reasserted their control of Viacom Thursday night, resolving a crisis gripping the media conglomerate by arranging the departure of their renegade executive chairman, president and CEO Philippe Dauman in exchange for a $72 million payout.

Arianna Huffington, the charismatic and self-invented founder of the Huffington Post, is stepping down as the site's editor-in-chief to build a new site around the concepts of health and wellness.

The move comes a few weeks after the Huffington Post's parent company, Verizon, acquired the fading digital powerhouse Yahoo.

Huffington ascribed her departure to the desire to pursue her separate and new initiative, called Thrive Global, built around the concepts of wellness and striking a balance between work and personal realms.

Just a few weeks ago, Donald Trump taunted Hillary Clinton over the length of time it had been since she had formally faced a pack of reporters with microphones, cameras, iPhones and notepads at the ready.

"So, it's been 235 days since crooked Hillary Clinton has had a press conference," Trump told reporters and supporters who gathered in Miami on July 27. "You, as reporters who give her all of these glowing reports, should ask yourselves why."

The news that sexual harassment allegations have cost Roger Ailes his job threatens to obscure Ailes' singular career and his almost unrivaled influence in the public sphere.

But no contemporary figure has done more to shape the intersection of American media and politics than Ailes, who, until Thursday, had been the Fox News chief since its very first day on the air in 1996.

In his long career, Ailes advised a succession of Republican presidents on how to gain power and maintain it — both on their payrolls and off the books.